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Who Scores Games by Hand Anymore?

Hand-held electronic devices allow users to download several scorekeeping applications that can do what paper scorecards and the eraserless pencil cannot: update statistics and correct mistakes.Credit
Uli Seit for The New York Times

The first thing Bruce Levy did upon recent entry into Yankee Stadium while accompanied by his in-laws and teenage son was to purchase a program in the area of the concourse behind home plate.

The vendor handed it to him along with a small blue pencil.

“For keeping score,” the vendor said.

“I know — I always keep score,” said Levy, 50, from Morristown, N.J.

The vendor, who said he was prohibited by his employer from giving his name to a reporter, explained: “People today don’t know what the pencil is for. It’s a dying thing.”

Dying, perhaps, but not dead yet. Against a tide of technology and a ballpark culture of entertainment options and limited attention spans, the scorekeeping pencil — like its first cousin at miniature golf courses — has persisted.

At about 3 ¼ inches long and with no eraser on top, the pencil has helped carry on the traditional method of scoring a ballgame that is generally believed to have begun with a late 19th-century sportswriter named Henry Chadwick.

Levy, who grew up near Yankee Stadium and who attends a few games every season, vowed to continue the struggle for conventional scorekeeping’s survival.

“I’m going to teach my son tonight,” he said. The boy, Aaron Levy, 15, admitted that he did not know the proper markings — a 9-2 putout (right field to catcher) from a backward K (strikeout looking).

His grandfather, Ira Antin, said one deterrent to ballpark scorekeeping has been the inability to purchase a mere scorecard.

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The programs Mitchell Peck sells at Yankee Stadium for $10 have a scorecard in the middle and come with a Yankees pencil.Credit
Uli Seit for The New York Times

“I worked across the street in the old Stadium in the 1940s, selling ice cream,” he said. “They sold scorecards for a nickel.”

At Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park, in Charleston, S.C. — where Alex Rodriguez played recently for the Yankees’ Class A Riverdogs — a more traditional program with a scorecard included sold for $1 and did a brisk business. But the advertising-rich program sold at Yankee Stadium, which has a scorecard in the centerfold, costs $10. The mini pencil — inscribed “New York Yankees” — is part of the deal.

Many people said they wanted the program only as a souvenir and opted not to take the pencil. But Stephan Loewenthil of New Rochelle happily took it while forking over his $10.

“For me it’s still a bargain, and it’s not about buying a souvenir,” he said. “It’s about making the game more immediate, keeping me locked in.”

Loewenthil, 63, was taught to keep score by his father at Yankee Stadium when he was 6 ½ years old. His son, Jacob, 26, had no interest in continuing the pastime.

“It’s my dad’s thing,” he said.

Stephan Loewenthil shrugged and said, “The reason young people don’t do it is because the next generation is all about speed and efficiency, not about detail.”

Occasionally, a young person came along with an appreciation of creating a finely cluttered scorecard. Having driven from upstate Oswego, N.Y., to sit in the bleachers, Paul Oleyourryk, 15, planned to keep score the way his father taught him at Little League games.

“I just like it,” he said. “I can always look back and see what happened.”

His friend, Kiernan Proud, also 15, held up a smartphone and scoffed at the notion of doing “hard work.” He added: “Too much to write down. I have a live ESPN game-cast. It keeps me updated.”

Hand-held electronic devices allow users not only to follow a game, but also to download several scorekeeping applications. The apps can do what paper scorecards and the eraserless pencil cannot: update statistics and correct mistakes, among other features.

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The scorecard a 15-year-old fan, Paul Oleyourryk, used at a game this season at Yankee Stadium.Credit
Uli Seit for The New York Times

Writing for Macworld in 2010, Philip Michaels — managing editor for the publication’s parent company, TechHive — rated the existing baseball scorekeeping apps. As a rabid baseball fan, he decided to use none of them.

When attending Giants games in San Francisco, Michaels, 41, keeps score in a book he bought in 2006, produced primarily for baseball broadcasters by Bob Carpenter, who calls games for the Washington Nationals.

“My complaint with the apps was that they confine you to keep score in their way,” Michaels said. “Everyone has their own system. It felt like overkill to me.”

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Kiril Savino, the chief technology officer and co-founder of GameChanger Media, said his company’s baseball app has gained traction on the youth, scholastic and collegiate levels because “baseball has always been focused on stats, and the app makes compiling them so much easier.”

Savino suggested that in building up from the grass-roots level with tens of thousands of documented downloads, the apps could eventually make the scorecard and pencil obsolete at major league ballparks as well.

But Kevin Ota, director of digital media for ESPN — which got into and out of the scorekeeping app business — said he had seen close to 100 of his daughters’ youth softball games in the past year alone, and only a few were scored on a hand-held device.

“One, it’s tough to see a mobile screen in the sun,” Ota said. “Two, you can drop the book in the dirt, throw it in a backpack, leave it out in the sun, sit on it, etc. It’s a little too geeky to use a mobile app to keep score, at this point.”

Even if the appeal of the app proves to be limited, Howie Rose, who has called Mets games since 1995, believes that the ballpark environment will gradually turn scorekeeping into “kind of a lost art.”

He grew up a scorekeeping Mets fan, attending games at Shea Stadium, including the near-perfect game by Tom Seaver on July 9, 1969, that was broken up by the Chicago Cubs’ Jimmy Qualls in the ninth inning. Years later, Rose, the broadcaster, dug out his scorecard of that game and sat with Seaver as the Hall of Fame pitcher recounted his late-inning approach, batter by batter.

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A program vendor at Yankee Stadium who said he was prohibited from giving his name to a reporter said: “People today don’t know what the pencil is for. It’s a dying thing.”Credit
Uli Seit for The New York Times

“I just never felt that I was in the game if I wasn’t keeping score,” Rose said. “Now, when I look down from the booth, you seldom see fans staying in their seats for more than a few innings at a time, much less keep score.”

For Rose, who also uses the scorebook made by Bob Carpenter, keeping a detailed account of the game is a vocational requirement. Another Mets’ broadcaster, Gary Cohen, charts every pitch, and the color analyst Keith Hernandez keeps an elaborate scorebook with a half-dozen different-colored Sharpies at his disposal.

But today’s fans go to ballparks that feature upscale restaurants, play areas for children and other attractions besides the game. Digital apps aside, there are also e-mails and social media sites to check, photos and videos to shoot, phone calls to make.

It can take an unusual young person to be content with a pencil, in the way Ben Lattimore, 18, was at Citi Field on July 4.

While his 20-year-old brother, Andrew, had no interest in keeping score, Lattimore bought a copy of Mets Magazine, which serves as a program and scorecard, for $5.

Lattimore learned to keep score in a course he took at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota on how to coach baseball, and he has taught a few baseball-playing friends with whom he has attended Twins games.

“They fill in for me when I go to the bathroom,” he said.

Lattimore has taken to saving his major league scorecards. His first collector’s item: Mariano Rivera’s final appearance in Minneapolis.

On another generational front on July 4 at Citi Field, Kevin Hogan, 54, of Richmond, Va., said keeping score by hand “helps fuel my anal retentiveness.” But he also thought the system, venerable as it is, could be better.

“I just asked the vendor, how come there’s no eraser on the pencil?” he said.

The vendor replied, “Don’t make any mistakes.”

But on that blisteringly hot day, the Mets and the Arizona Diamondbacks played a 15-inning marathon that dragged on for 5 hours 46 minutes. Under the circumstances, even the most fervent traditionalists — not to mention their time-honored but worn-down pencils — may have come to the point where enough was enough.